There's water everywhere in poetry these days, from Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book to Jorie Graham's Sea Change, Brigit Pegeen Kelly's rain and rivers to the "ocean in our lungs" of Michael Symmons Roberts's "The Kingdom of Water is Coming". With this collection, shortlisted for this year's TS Eliot prize, Maura Dooley becomes the latest poet to dip in a toe — but while it's undeniably a splashy, sodden landscape she's created, brimming with rain and snow and tears, it's not water per se but its effect on our senses that intrigues her. Dooley uses her poems to look down at what's submerged — by memory, words, grief — and shows us a world subtly rippled and distorted, in which everyday objects are "made strange" and nothing, when you reach in a hand, is quite where you expected it to be.

Above all, it's the passage of time and the side-shifts it causes in our perception that engage Dooley here; a form of temporal refraction evident throughout a collection in which she turns repeatedly to events from her past, but easiest to spot, perhaps, in her political poems, where we're looking back alongside her. In "The 1984 Perspective", inspired by the "battle" between police and NUM pickets at Orgreave, she points up the dislocation between viewpoints then and now; the move from the up-close gaze of the striking miners, looking no further than the "coal, washed up on the beach, / handsome and useful ... scavenged / for a little warmth", to today's cool, interpretive view. "Think of it now," she says of the strike, "and what you see is not / the whole story but the seam of something / precious gone underground". In the intervening years, Dooley suggests, coal has been transmuted from physical reality, tangible and "useful", into "coal": symbol, trope, allegory. That this poem not only exemplifies the collection's preoccupations but also repackages them for us in an alternative conceit, with coal replacing water as the metaphor for depth, is evidence of her skill.

In the more intimate settings that make up the bulk of this collection, Dooley's fascination with what lies beneath shows itself more subtly as a bent for self-interrogation, a tendency that reaches its climax in "Stent!", in which the speaker talks directly to her own heart (" 'felt, 'rending, 'broken, / it's what I knew you by"). In general, though, the "you" to whom her poems are addressed is either unaware of the attention (as in the sweetly tender "Midsummer Lullaby", in which a child, "reaching out / for a lamp to scratch the dark" is "small enough still, to make do instead / with any little light my hand might shed") or a figure who exists in memory only: it's the speaker's relationship with her loved ones, rather than the loved ones themselves, that's being examined.

In those poems where there's a chance the addressee may be listening, she favours a brand of love that's unshowy, deliberately under the radar, as in "Valentine", where the heart she chooses to honour is not the one "over the mantelpiece / heaved out for all to see" but "only felt / in thought and deed / an insistent patterning / when we lie like spoons at night". The poem crests on a shimmer of interlinked words — "Corazon, coeur, / kindness, the core of you" — in which sound and meaning breathe drowsily back and forth to coalesce in a complex hum like the after-peal of a rung bell. Here we have love as a whisper in the dark, hushed but confirmatory; the central image of the heart as core, meanwhile, harks back to the idea of depths mined that infuses these poems.

This is a collection, in fact, that's constructed on the vertical plane. Its visuals are all of rising and falling; of objects plumbing the depths (music that "drops like a stone, / falls like news") or growing up into the light (the "Rockefeller building, rising like sap"). In terms of subject, too, her poems offer little in the way of elbow-room. Torchbeam-tight, they typically focus on a single incident or emotion and render it deftly in a few bright brushstrokes — a flock of starlings appearing as "sky nails" that "fix our eyes / to the heavens".

It's partly for this reason that the outpouring of her final poem, "The Source", comes as such a surprise. "It is the breaking of the waters that begins it all," opens Dooley, and with that, the poem unspools over several pages, telling the story of our need for water, our love of it, our slow and steady abuse of it; allowing the element to emerge finally from metaphor into matter with "the suddenness of a buried river". Like a flood, it sweeps all before it, gathering to itself myth, chronicle, science; Moses, Narcissus, Alice drowning in her own tears.

It's an ambitious piece, gorgeously done in places, but ultimately it lacks the punch of the rest of the collection. Again, it's the individual images rather than the attempted sweep of history that captivate: the "slither of eels in their amber shallows, / like tiny guy ropes"; the London doctor who sees asthma attacks "plotted ... as breathless kisses, / along the banks of concreted brooks". It's the wrought strength of her short poems, the burnished exactitude of her imagery, that make this a fine collection. Neither wet nor watery, this is solid stuff.

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